Nicholas’ story

This is my son, seven-year old Nicholas Green, of Bodega Bay, California, who was shot in an attempted carjacking in Italy while we were driving on the main road south from Naples on a family vacation. My wife, Maggie, and I donated his organs and corneas, which went to seven very sick Italians, four them teenagers. Two of the seven were going blind, all the others could have died at any time. In the next ten years, organ donation rates in Italy, which were then just about the lowest in Europe, tripled – a rate of increase no other country came close to – so that thousands of people are alive who would have died. All around the world his story brought people’s attention to the acute shortage of donated organs and became known as ‘The Nicholas Effect.’

Nicholas, 2nd grade

In this blog I want to publicize the continuing ripples of this decision and to show that every year thousands of other people make the decision to donate organs rather than bury them. But I also I want to show that even at the worst of times, when the temptation to turn inward in grief and bitterness is almost irresistible, the human spirit burns brightly enough in people of every kind that instead of being consumed they reach out to complete strangers and — quite simply – snatch them from death.
I hope you will find it interesting, Reg Green

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Reg Green was the chief business writer for the London Daily Telegraph and a freelance commentator for the BBC. Although he specialized in economics, he wrote in his spare time for almost every section of the newspaper, including being the newspaper's jazz critic, writing travel articles, obituaries, book reviews and soccer. After emigrating to the United States he founded and edited Mutual Fund News Service, an investment newsletter. He is the father of Nicholas Green, a seven-year old California boy who was shot in an attempted car jacking while on a family vacation in Italy in 1994. The killing became a worldwide news event when Reg and his wife, Maggie, donated their son's organs to seven very sick Italians, four of them teenagers. They went on to found the Nicholas Green Foundation (https://www.nicholasgreen.org) to promote organ donation to save some of the tens of thousands of deaths around the world caused every year by the failure of one organ that could have been replaced by a donated one.